Tom Blomefield

The Tengenenge Sculpture Community founded by Tom Blomefield in l966 in the Guruve District in Zimbabwe remains a significant aspect of the development of Zimbabwe´s stone sculpture today as it was in its beginnings. Tengenenge is recognized the world over as a place where people of different African cultural and spiritual origins live and work together in an atmosphere of conciliation and harmony. It is recognized as a place central to the overall development of the Guruve District offering people who otherwise might be living a menial or basic life, a creative and financially and socially stable way of life through making stone sculpture. Today the strength and importance of the name Tengenenge as both a crucible and an aspect of the dynamic of the stone sculpture movement has given rise to the name ´´Tengenenge Sculpture´´. But what Tengenenge is a community of individuals bound together communally by their work, their family ties, their loyalty and reverence to their Founder Director - Tom Blomefield and ways of adapting to modern Africa without losing the social skills imparted to their by their African traditions, upholding of the structures of family and marriage deference to elders, protection of nature and the ecology, and retention of the tenets of their belief systems be they African or Christian.

Tom Blomefield the man who instilled these things into the original, later and today´s sculptors at Tengenenge is now 81 years old, a man with the energy levels of a much younger man, a man whose fluency in the Chewa language of his early sculptors and his familiarity with the other languages spoken at Tengenenge, Ayawo, Mbunda and Shona and his fine abilities as a sculptor and painter have made him as much part of the community as the artists themselves.

Tom Blomefield came to Southern Rhodesia to seek adventure, a life out of the box; a life that would take him up mountains, across flooded rivers, down mines, a life seeking wealth of the spirit and the soul. In Southern Rhodesia he became an apprentice tobacco farmer and part of that apprenticeship was learning the Chewa language with a grammar book by candlelight in a pole and dagga house on Bentley´s farm near the stone rich mountains of the Great Dyke, which reach to the Zambezi Valley. His relationship with the Chewa workers on the farm was one of great cultural insight on his part, he encouraged their Dance Society the Gule Wamkulu, and other cultural practices which they bought with them from Malawi. He endeared himself to the local Kore-kore by befriending Chief Chimburere (“no slick wizard but an old man in a shiny black suit”) and benefiting from his wisdom. When international sanctions decimated the local tobacco market, Tom Blomefield now owner of Tengenenge farm rather than making his workers redundant encouraged them to make stone sculpture from serpentine deposits found in the mountains of the Great Dyke. And he, almost as one of them, became a sculptor, The Chewa and Yao´s from Malawi, the Mbundas from Angola and North Western Zambia made sculptures which bore strong relationship to the Nyau dancers and masks of the Chewa the Nyago and ben Dancers of the Yao and the Makishi Likishi dancers of the Mbunda Mbundu, and the local Eastern Bantu Kore-kore.

So Tengenenge which means - ´´the beginning of the beginning´´ Chewa began. Others joined in, mealie guards, compound managers, cooks, itinerant farm workers finding that from stone sculpture they could claim their cultural past in the way they had claimed it in their dancers, through making their drums and their masks Tengenenge today is visited by buyers of stone sculpture, art lovers, scholars in cultural studies and the visual arts, film makers, makers of documentaries from the world over.

Tom Blomefield today, rotund with flowing white hair and beard, teller of stories, miner of stones, and in 2007, Founder of a new community of sculptors at Bhobogrande near Bare town near Chiweshe in Mashonaland Central, a person versed in the metaphysical aspects of African religion, a great dancer still, spends half a year in Netherlands organising Tengenenge exhibitions and the other half in his pole and dagga house at Tengenenge organizing Tengenenge. He remains one of the first and best Europeans in Africa to make a cultural break through and make it work for the good of mankind. He deserves accolade and great award.

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